


The Four Visitations

by hollycomb



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Astral Projection, Evil, Fate & Destiny, Gaslighting, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Murderers, Regret, Soulmates, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-13
Updated: 2017-10-13
Packaged: 2019-01-16 16:07:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12346044
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hollycomb/pseuds/hollycomb
Summary: Ben Solo's unseen mentor promises a peek at his destiny.Armitage Hux is not prepared to see a stranger walk through the wall of his room and ask him what year this is, but he's willing to give even a hallucination the time of day. He's never had a friend before.





	The Four Visitations

At no point during the trek from the academy grounds does Ben think it will actually work. He’s just messing around, hiding from Luke and stewing in the oily, choking anger that has been his only comfort since he was sent away. He can feel his Friend at the edges of his mind, trying to help. Only once they’re alone together, away from the irritating presence of the other Force users, does Ben begin to believe he can do this.

 _This is far beyond meditation_ , his Friend says. _You will experience a physical removal to another location_.

Ben is glad to hear clear words. It used to scare him, but now that his parents have abandoned him to Luke and this dreary excuse for a school, he waits for the voice and is sorry when it’s not there. Nobody else likes him or believes in him as much as his secret Friend always has.

 _Do not be afraid_ , his Friend says now. 

I’m not, Ben thinks. He’s just sitting in a cave not far from the training compound, eyes closed and back turned on the forest outside. Meditating, sort of. It’s easier to hear his Friend when he’s alone. 

_Reach far away from what you know of the world_. 

Ben isn’t sure how to do that. He takes a deep breath and embraces the stillness and distance from everyone else, wanting to crawl deeper into it. His Friend has promised him a special treat to counteract the disappointment of being sent here: a way to look into the future and see his true destiny. Ben is just glad to hear he has one at all. His Friend has been right about so many things, even things that Ben once would have thought impossible, like Ben’s own mother betraying him and abandoning him to Luke’s joyless world of quiet discipline. Luke doesn’t know everything about the Force. Ben knows some things, already, through his Friend, that Luke does not.

 _You will experience a falling sensation_ , his Friend warns now. _Don’t fight it_.

Ben silently acknowledges this advice and gives himself over to it. He’s not afraid of falling.

The woods seem to go quiet first. He’s aware that small animals are foraging in the brush, that birds are singing and leaves are rustling, but he’s removed himself from those sounds. He’s going elsewhere, a sense of purpose tugging at his gut as he does. It’s a bit like nausea and he almost indulges something that warns him to pull away, that this is dangerous, but it can’t be. His truest Friend led him here. He moves further into the hollow space that’s unfurling all around him, sucking him toward a point in the distance like a hyperdrive tunnel. 

There’s a startling moment of free fall when he knows he’s done it: he’s left his body. And he flounders, feeling like he’s been put out an airlock, adrift in space. He seeks his Friend’s guidance but there’s no voice now. He understands then that his Friend is connected to his physical body somehow. Now that Ben has left it behind, he can’t be helped. He has to do this fully on his own from here forward.

The impulse to panic prickles at him. He ignores it. He’s powerful: uniquely so. He’s been assured of this, though not by any of the family members who claim to care. There has to be something here in this emptiness waiting for him. His destiny. He concentrates, seeking anything that feels like it might belong to him. The first flicker that reaches him is a soft, broken sound. It’s human, and small, something like a child crying in the distance. 

At first Ben thinks it’s his assumption about this sound that conjures the images slowly coming into view: a crying child appears at the end of what first looks like a long, dark corridor. Ben draws closer, cautious but not scared, and the dark corridor fades away, the details of a sterile room replacing it. He feels a familiar coldness closing in around him, and the particular echoing sensation that the Force reflects when he’s on his dad’s ship. They’re in space, aboard a craft of some kind, and he wasn’t just imagining things. There really is a crying kid with red hair staring up at him, wide-eyed and pale with shock.

“You can see me?” Ben says, touching his own chest to check his solidity. It seems intact, as if he’s really here. 

“What?” the boy says softly, stunned. He’s sitting on the floor with his knees pulled to his chest, his face wet and his eyes bugged out like he’s seeing a ghost. His clothing is uniform-like, all black. “How, what-- Where did you come from? How did you-- Who are you?”

A chill moves through Ben’s bones when he hears the boy’s Imperial accent. He looks around, checking to make sure they’re alone here. Even if they are, this might be bad. Like, really bad. Has he actually projected himself onto some kind of Imperial ship? Not all of the old destroyers were located and captured after the war. He remembers his quest for his destiny and pushes the fear away. 

“I’ll ask the questions here,” Ben says, squatting down to the boy’s eye level. They’re on opposite sides of this windowless room, but it’s small. Almost like a prison cell. “Who are you?” Ben returns, surprised the boy isn’t screaming and running for help. But maybe he’s not a boy at all. Maybe he’s just some vision. 

“How did you get on this ship?” the boys asks. Vision or not, he’s apparently stubborn, scowling already as the first wave of shock recedes. “It was, as if-- You just walked through the wall, did you not?” 

Ben snorts at this proper speech coming out of such a young kid’s mouth. “How old are you?” he tries. 

“I’m five years old.” He says so as if to announce that he’s therefore clearly grown-up enough to handle whatever’s happening, chin lifted. “Are you one of them?”

“One of who?”

“The children, the-- You don’t look like them.” 

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m a Force user and this is a vision of my destiny. I think.”

“I’m not a vision.” The boy frowns. He puts his shoulders back and slides his legs out in front of him as if he’s no longer scared. “I’m a real person and my name is Armitage.” 

“Armitage? That’s a name?” 

Ben feels bad when the kid’s face falls as if he’s heard this criticism plenty of times already. He’s probably not actually a real person. He just thinks he is, because that’s how a vision would think. Ben puts his hand out for a shake, wondering if he can touch things here. The floor feels real and solid under his boots.

“I’m Ben,” he says, still waiting for Armitage to take his outstretched hand. “I’m ten years old. Sorry I scared you. This is just an experiment. I won’t hurt you.” 

“I know you won’t.” Armitage slaps Ben’s hand away. The physical contact is like a shock of dull electricity, not painful but powerful enough to make Ben waver backward onto his heels. “I’ll call down my army on you if you try anything.” 

“Your army, huh?” Ben sits down and crosses his legs, studying his companion and wondering if he’s some kind symbol that Ben will have to interrupt when this vision is over. “Anyone ever call you that? It’s better than Armitage.” 

“Call me-- What?” Armitage is glaring, his eyes still puffy and red from the crying he was doing when Ben got here. There’s a red mark on his left cheek that Ben took for a blush at first. It’s darkening into something more like a bruise. 

“Armie,” Ben says, trying not to stare. Did someone hit this kid in the face? Bullies, probably. He’s skinny and small and obviously not good with people. “Like, for a nickname, ‘cause you said-- Never mind. We’re on a ship, aren’t we?”

“Of course we’re on a ship. How did you get on board?” 

“Through the Force.” 

Armitage makes a face like he knows enough about the Force to loathe it. “That’s stupid,” he says. “I don’t believe you.” 

“Even after you saw me walk through a wall? I’m seeking my destiny,” Ben says, more to himself than to Armitage. He looks around the room, which is spare and cold with unadorned walls and only a few pieces of utilitarian furniture: a cot-like bed just big enough for a child, durasteel cabinet with three drawers, and an adult-sized durasteel desk and chair, all of it bolted to the floor. “Where does that door lead to?” Ben asks. 

“The hallway,” Armitage says. “But you’d have to walk through the wall again if you want to go out there. It’s locked.” 

“Who locked you in here?” 

Armitage looks annoyed by the question, or wounded. “My father,” he says tightly. 

“Oh. Is this your room?” 

“You ask stupid questions. I thought Force users could read minds.” 

Ben takes that as a yes. He shrugs. “We can, but I’m still working on it.” He probably shouldn’t have admitted as much. Some laypeople will blurt the truth at the mere suggestion that a Force user can see it anyway. But what important truths could this battered little kid have to hide?

“You’re going to get me in trouble,” Armitage mutters. He pulls his knees to his chest again. “Nobody’s supposed to be in here.” 

“Who did that to your face?” Ben asks, pointing to his own cheek. “Were you in a fight? Is that why you got sent to your room?”

The energy in the room changes in a way that makes Ben feel cruel for asking the question. Though he can’t read minds, he’s always been adept at sensing people’s feelings. Too adept, Han once accused, when Ben had, in Han’s opinion, gotten his feelings hurt over ‘nothing.’ 

“Your father,” Ben says, his chest tightening at the thought of his own. Han would never hit him. He knows that much. But he also knows what it’s like to be hurt by your dad. 

Armitage folds his arms over his knees and seems to want to hide his face. He only looks down, still trying to appear braver than he is. 

“What year is this?” Ben asks, to change the subject. His Friend mentioned that visions can carry one to the past, or even the future. 

“Five,” Armitage says. “Same as me,” he adds, some pridefulness returning to his posture with this declaration. 

“ABY, you mean?”

“Of course!”

“Whoa, really?” Ben stands and paces, agitated and excited about this information. He’s also growing somewhat concerned about how he’s going to get back into his actual body, and more so in light of this new information. “And you’re five years old?”

“Yes.” 

“That means you’re actually five years older than me, in my time. Real time, I mean. This is the year I was born.” Ben is pleased with this, despite the potential complications of returning to his own time. He paces some more and crosses his arms over his chest. “Okay, so. I’m meant to see something here in the past. Interesting.” 

“You’re mad,” Armitage says. “This isn’t the past. It’s happening now.” 

“That’s only your perspective. This is my vision.” 

“It is not! You’re the one who walked into _my_ room.” 

“I wonder why,” Ben mutters, glancing at the door. He could probably open it with the Force, if his powers work as usual within a vision. He’s reluctant to try, imagining stormtroopers with blasters just outside, and cold-eyed Imperial officers ready to torture him for information about his rebel parents. “What’s this ship called?” Ben asks, turning back to Armitage. 

“I’m not telling you.” 

“Why not?” 

“Because you’re a Republic spy. Obviously. If I could open that door I’d have summoned the guards already.” 

“Big talk,” Ben says, stepping closer. 

The way Armitage cowers makes Ben feel terrible. Imperial escapee or not, he’s just a little kid, and his father is some evil Imperial prick who hit him in the face. Ben sits down again, at enough of a distance to appear non-threatening. 

“I’m not a spy,” Ben says. 

“I don’t believe you,” Armitage says, voice small. “What do you want from me?”

“Nothing. I’m just here for a vision of my destiny. Weird that it took me to some old Imperial ship, ten years ago.” Ben wants to ask more questions about what sort of mission this ship is on, if any, but it would probably be smarter to win this kid’s trust first, if possible. Maybe this is all a symbolic puzzle he needs to solve. “So this is your room,” Ben says, looking around again, though there’s not really anything to see. “They don’t let you have toys in the ex-Empire?”  

“Toys are a waste of time,” Armitage says. He lowers his left leg, then his right, and crosses them to mirror Ben’s posture. “I do have a game,” he says, mumbling this like it’s a confession. 

“Yeah? Which one?” 

Armitage hesitates, then moves toward the front end of the little cot. He reaches under its mattress and pulls out a slim folded board and a clear plasti-bag full of trinkets. 

“This is a strategy game,” Armitage says, unfolding the board. He gives Ben a warning look, as if he’s expecting to be teased. “I invented it,” he says when Ben only stares at him mildly. 

“That’s cool,” Ben says. The board looks like it used to be a mess hall tray. It has hand-drawn symbols and the trinkets in the baggy are an assortment of random things: bottle caps and buttons, a small silver key, and what looks like an Imperial officer’s pocket flare. Ben forgets the proper name for it, but it resembles a long, slender bullet casing. Armitage explains how to play and Ben half-listens; it’s pretty complicated, with every piece moving differently and the two sides behaving like armies that battle in each round. 

“Sounds kinda like holo chess,” Ben says. 

“I don’t know that game.” 

“It’s on a board like this, with fighters like this that all have different ways of moving, only they’re animated holo projections that pop up from a projector inside the board.”

Armitage’s eyes widen. “That’s--” He looks down at his buttons and caps, fingers twitching. “So you are from the Republic, like I thought.” 

“Why do you say that?”

“Why! If you have toys like that, you must be rich. And spoiled, like all of them.” 

“Yeah, I wish.” Ben’s mother is supposedly wealthy, but he never sees the bounty of this wealth himself. “All my parents do is work, and they sent me away to a monastery where we sleep on the ground. I had to leave all my stuff at home. Well, most of it.” 

“A monastery?” Armitage squints. His face gets red, and Ben senses that he’s embarrassed because he doesn’t know that word.

“For Force users,” Ben says. “It’s supposed to be a school but for me it’s like a prison. There are only two other kids there, and--” Ben doesn’t like to admit this, but what is a vision-child going to do with the information? “They don’t like me.”

“No one likes me here,” Armitage says. His flush deepens. 

“Even my parents wanted to get rid of me.” Ben has been wanting to shout this at someone, at Luke, and it feels both good and awful to finally say it out loud. “But I’m working hard, because I’m going to show them all someday. When I reach my full power.”

“Me too,” Armitage says. 

Ben raises his eyebrows and thinks of asking, what power is that? But that would be mean.

“Are there stormtroopers out there?” Ben asks, glancing at the door. 

“They patrol the hallways,” Armitage says, nodding.

“Do they know the Empire fell? That the Emperor is dead?”

“Of course. We all know that. We’re not stupid.” 

“I thought maybe the Imperials lied to them to keep them in line.” 

“We don’t lie to our own people like the Republic does.”

“Ha! Who told you that? The Empire was all propaganda. No truth.” 

“Who told you that?” Armitage asks, eyes narrowing.

My mom, Ben almost says. “Everyone knows it,” he says. “Sorry someone lied to you here.” 

“Sorry someone lied to you.” Hux gathers up his game pieces as if to shield them from Ben’s sudden betrayal of his trust. “You’re the one who’s not even real, probably. I must be dreaming.” 

“Pinch yourself,” Ben says. 

“I will not.” 

Ben groans and stands, again contemplating the door. What is he supposed to do here? Would there be consequences if he got blasted by a stormtrooper in this vision? Not for the first time, he wishes his Friend’s guidance was more clear. He’s wished that about Luke’s, too. Someday his instincts will be razor sharp and unflinching. For now he walks in circles while Armitage watches. 

“Are you afraid they’ll shoot you?” Armitage asks.

“No,” Ben says, glowering, because yes, he is. 

“Maybe the blaster would go right through you, like you went through the wall.” 

“But I touched your hand,” Ben says. “And I’m walking on your floor.” He stomps as loudly as possible, to demonstrate.

“Shhh!” Armitage stuffs his game back under his mattress and scrambles up onto his feet. “Don’t be loud! I’ll be blamed if you’re found here.”

“How come?”

“Because I’m blamed for everything.” 

“Oh yeah? Did they pin the defeat of the Emperor on you when you were a baby?”

“I don’t mean by the-- Just by my father, so be quiet!” Armitage touches the mark on his cheek, then rips his hand away when he realizes he’s drawn attention to it. 

“The Empire was evil,” Ben says. “And so’s what’s left of it, seems like. Maybe-- Maybe I’m meant to bring you back with me. To save you.”

“Back where?” Armitage sits primly on his bed, posture perfect. There’s a hopeful glint in his eyes that makes Ben sorry he said anything, since he’s pretty sure that’s not the case. This is the past, for one thing. Somewhere in Ben’s own time, Armitage is fifteen years old. Ben tries to picture it, tilting his head. He can’t.

“Or maybe I’m just supposed to change your mind about something,” Ben muses. “Maybe you were going to grow up to be a really bad guy, like the new Emperor.” 

Armitage flinches as if he’s been caught. He does want to rule the galaxy. Ben supposes he wanted that, too, more or less, at Armitage’s age. He supposes he still does, sometimes, when he thinks about becoming the most powerful Force user of all time. Already he’s abandoned the word Jedi in his own mind, when he considers his future. His Friend says that ideology is limiting. Too small for his potential. Ben thinks this is true, sometimes with guilt.

“Nothing you say can change my mind about anything,” Armitage says, his little voice trembling with the effort of refusing help. He doesn’t trust Ben; why should he? Ben senses that nobody in Armitage’s world has proved trustworthy yet. 

“Maybe we’ll meet again in the future,” Ben says. He feels a prick of confirmation at the center of his body, and with it comes a kind of backward pull, as if he’s standing in the middle of a stream that’s flowing toward a fixed point behind him. The pull is weak, for now. He understands that he might lean into it. 

“I don’t see why we should,” Armitage says. “Unless you come to your senses and join us.” 

“Join what?” Ben says, barking a laugh. “The crumbled remains of a failed Empire? No thanks. You can keep it.”

“We’ll see.” Armitage glares at him. Even with his eyes still red-rimmed from crying, there’s a feral viciousness in him that Ben can’t help but admire. Ben shrinks away from his own viciousness too often. 

“I guess we will see,” Ben says dumbly. He feels like he’s squandered whatever opportunity this vision was meant to offer. The pull at the center of him is stronger now, but he’s not ready to submit to it yet. “I wish I could help you,” he says, realizing this as he says so.

Armitage fidgets, frowns. “Help me with what?”

“Getting away from this place. It makes the one I’m stuck in look like paradise.” 

“I’m lucky to be here.” Armitage doesn’t sound so sure, his hands curling into fists over knees. “My-- Some people were left behind. Captured. My father made sure I was rescued.” 

“Rescued, huh.” 

Armitage’s cheek twitches, just under the spreading bruise. He looks down at the floor. Ben feels terrible. There’s so much suffering in the galaxy even now. And what are Luke and his students doing about it? Camping in the forest and talking about how wonderful their sense of restored balance is. For them, the story is over. They won. 

“I think I have to go now,” Ben says. There’s a kind of rushing sensation around his ears, and faintly he can hear a bird’s shrill cry. “Back to my time.” 

“Already?” Armitage asks, looking up. Ben doesn’t understand the distress on his face until he considers that Armitage might be locked up in this room for a long time, by himself. 

“Sorry,” Ben says, sincerely. “I wish. I don’t know.” 

“Will you come back?”

“If I can,” Ben says, nodding. “Yeah.” 

He means it, and something about realizing this is what sends him shooting backward. The scene blurs to darkness and Ben feels himself whirling within it, as if he’s been pitched into a wild ocean during a storm. When he finds himself back in the cave, launched forward onto all fours, he loses his lunch onto the rocky ground. His Friend might have warned him not to eat before seeking his destiny. 

Stumbling out of the cave, Ben blinks up at the treetops and sees that it’s close to sundown. Luke will be worried about him, maybe. Ben is skilled enough already to block his uncle’s attempts to locate him via the Force. He needs his privacy for things like this. He already guards so many important secrets. 

He leans against the rocky exterior of the cave and closes his eyes, takes a deep breath. Some feedback from his Friend about what just happened would be nice. Who was that boy? What has he to do with Ben’s destiny? Was all that only meant to leave him with an impression, a lesson, or were there concrete details he was meant to memorize? 

_All in time_ , his Friend says before departing. Sometimes his presence dashes away in a dizzying rush, as if he has important business elsewhere. Ben wonders what his Friend knows about the boy he saw. He wonders if his powerful Friend could help that poor kid somehow. 

Walking in the near-dark back toward the torches that have been lit on the academy grounds, Ben realizes that he didn’t even think to ask for the boy’s surname. He’s annoyed at himself for the oversight, but he senses that it won’t matter. He’ll see Armitage again someday.

**

Hux doesn’t remember much of Arkanis beyond the rain. Though he knows it’s foolish, he feels compelled to go walking during the rare rain showers on the grounds of the new Academy, and today he uses a cold, drizzling one as an excuse to escape his bunkmates and his father and the irritating noise of humanity entirely. 

He shouldn’t have left his coat, but he doesn’t want to go back for it. Near the slime-covered pond at the edge of the southern wood, he turns back to observe the Academy buildings and to make sure that no one’s seen him wandering off alone. He’s infamous for having no friends, and for whatever reason people are unwilling to believe that he doesn’t want them. If ever someone came along who was worthy of his attention in a way that would advance his own interests, he might consider spending some of his limited energy on befriending them. But no one here inspires him. He’s always been alone in the galaxy, and he prefers it that way. His father criticizes him for having no chums but makes disgusting comments about his own so-called friends behind their backs whenever he gets the opportunity. 

In the woods, Hux is sheltered from the continuing rainfall just enough to make it refreshing rather than distracting. Alone with his thoughts, he allows himself to acknowledge that he likes the smell of the leaves overhead when they’re wet, and the way his sturdy uniform boots squeak through the mud puddles. As a very little boy he’d not had proper shoes. He congratulates himself often on how well he’s able to appreciate these basic necessities others take for granted. It’s good that he grew up the way he did, however hard it was at times. He’s more serious-minded for it now. All his professors who are worth a damn consider him their top student. They haven’t told him so, but he can tell.

His thoughts are wandering in this fashion when he hears a kind of _whoosh_ just ahead of him on the muddy trail, as if a bird of prey swept by while his gaze was lowered. He looks to his left, trying to track the bird, and then ahead again when he sees nothing soaring through the trees. He shouts and jumps backward when he sees a man instead, standing suddenly ahead of him on the path, dressed all in black and looking murderous. 

“Where did you come from?” Hux asks, wishing he was advanced enough in training to have an Academy-issued blaster on his belt. He has two knives, anyway: one in a hidden compartment he designed himself and built onto the inside of his belt, and another tucked into his left boot.

“It’s you,” the man says. He tosses his long, dark hair off his face when the rain begins to make it stick there. He’s not actually a man, Hux sees, though he’s tall. He’s somewhere around Hux’s age, and somehow familiar. 

“What are you supposed to be?” Hux scans the tall boy’s belt for weapons and sees none visible, but he’s wearing a heavy cloak and could have anything under there. “Some kind of assassin?” 

“You don’t remember me. That’s okay. I thought you might not.” 

Hux wipes rainwater from his face, clearing it away from his eyes to get a better look at this person. Doing so is what makes him remember: he was crying alone in his room, a very long time ago, after Brendol had smacked him in the face in front of three other adults, none of whom protested on his behalf. In his childish self-pity he’d imagined or dreamed that another boy came into his room and lectured him about the Republic’s superiority. That was this same boy, though he’s some years older now and though it can’t be him. That boy wasn’t real.  

“No,” Hux says, stepping backward. “That was-- A fantasy. A game I played.” He digs his nails into his palms to make sure he’s awake. The chill of rainwater down the back of his shirt feels more real now than it did a moment ago. He shivers, eyes wide. 

“It was real,” Ben says. “Sorry it took me so long to get back to you.” His nostrils flare and he glances away, jaw tightening. “I’ve had unfair restrictions placed upon me all my life.” 

Hux snorts. He suspects he could tell this wild wizard from the future or whatever a thing or two about what living a restricted life is really like. Ben narrows his eyes as if he’s sensed Hux’s thoughts and doesn’t like them. 

“How old are you now?” Ben asks. 

“Fifteen.” Hux could deny this apparition any answers, but he feels compelled to interact with it.

Ben sniffs as if there’s something funny about Hux’s age. “Me too,” he says. “Damn. So that means we’re still not on the same timeline. You’d be twenty now, in mine.” 

“Oh, I’m still to believe you’re visiting from the future?” 

“I tried to find your current self. Current in my time, I mean. But I ended up here. Where are we?”

“At my school,” Hux says, not eager to mention the precise city or even planet. If this is really happening and he’s not lost his mind, it must be some Republic-bred trickery. Leave it to them to do something as foolishly overcomplicated as dispatching handsome boys to try and charm First Order youth into abandoning their ideals. 

“Looks like a forest to me,” Ben says, turning his face up toward the treetops. 

“Obviously these are the grounds. The campus is near here.” 

“You’re walking alone in the rain.” Ben grins as if there’s something clever about this observation. He does the hair-toss thing again, flicking water in Hux’s direction in the process. “Anyway, hi. Armie.” 

“No one calls me that.” Hux feels a kind of drain stopper being tugged out from the center of him. As a boy he did sometimes wish someone would call him that, after his imaginary conversation with a boy who claimed to be a Force user from the future. 

“What do they call you?” Ben asks. 

“Hux, unless they want trouble.” 

“So you are his son!” Ben beams and walks forward, craning his neck as if to get a better look at Hux, who steps backward in alarm. “I did some research,” Ben says. “Into red-headed Imperials. Came across a Brendol Hux in the Republic’s records database. Their intel mentioned a kid, but there was no name in the file.” 

Hux isn’t sure what about this horrifies him most, or why Ben knowing of Brendol feels like a betrayal. He thinks of the bruise he had on his cheek the day Ben came to him. How embarrassed he’d been by it. 

“Figures he wouldn’t have mentioned my name enough to bring it to Republic attention,” Hux says, trying to imagine what their dossier on Brendol’s activities must look like. 

“My friend said he’d help you,” Ben says, eyes wild. “That things would get better for you after our visitation, after my vision. Did they?”

Hux boggles at the question. Incidentally, Rax had suddenly decided to gift him with an army of deadly children in the days after Ben’s appearance in his room. Rae offered to ally with him shortly afterward, in exchange for protection from those same children. Her first act as his ally was to give Brendol a beating that somehow stopped Brendol from smacking Hux around, though nothing short of murdering Brendol could or would stop his sneering criticisms. 

Ben beams. “He did help you. I can tell. Look at you, you’re-- Uh. You grew up.” 

“That’s generally what happens when one doesn’t die in childhood. Why are you here now?” Hux’s heart beats faster when he considers that Ben might be here to bestow him with more gifts of sudden good fortune, if it’s true that he had anything to do with those previous windfalls. 

“I’m not sure,” Ben confesses, and Hux withholds a groan. “I wanted to see if I could even do it again, if I could find you. I need help, to do it. Turns out.”

“Help from whom?”

Ben makes a face, and Hux thinks again of his father and how he’d shied away from talking about what Brendol had done to him when Ben appeared in the aftermath. 

“My master,” Ben says, tightly. 

“Some kind of Jedi thing, I assume.”

“No.” Ben darkens and walks around Hux on the path, his heavy cloak swinging behind him. Everything about him is dramatic and overblown, and Hux supposes he should expect no less from a time-traveling wizard who can appear and disappear at will. “I’m not a Jedi,” Ben says when Hux walks behind him. This statement sounds heavy, like a purge and a promise at the same time. “But that’s a secret,” Ben says, spinning around to face Hux again. “I’m training with two masters. I only truly serve one of them, and he’s the one who helped me get to you, both times. He’s the one who helped you when you were little, too. He knows of the Order. He wants to help it advance to a real power in the galaxy.” 

“Who is he?” Hux asks. He doesn’t think much of these promises, though it would be nice to believe he could actually partner with Force users who can reach into the past or the future and influence things to his advantage. 

“He’ll reveal himself to you in time,” Ben says, voice lowering as he steps closer to Hux. “He knows of my interest in you and approves.” 

Hux has to work hard to keep an openly shocked expression off his face. “Your interest in me?” 

“I mean. Yeah. I asked to see my destiny, and twice now the Force has lead me to you.” 

“Who _are_ you?” Hux asks again, more seriously now. 

“What do you mean?” Ben asks. He seems hurt by the question, as if Hux should know the answer by instinct. 

“I mean where do you come from, what is your life that this is a part of it? Visions of me from the past, or so you claim-- Are you still in a monastery?” 

That word makes Ben smile, for some reason. “Yep,” he says. “I’m pretty advanced now. Made my own lightsaber and everything.” 

“Have you got it?”

“I can’t exactly bring weapons through the void.” 

“The void,” Hux mutters. He scoffs and withholds a remark about Ben’s clothing having come through the void intact. Mentioning that might sound too much like he’s envisioning Ben nude. “What’s that like?” he asks instead. “Traveling through time and space or what have you?”

“It’s like passing out and waking up at the same time. Intense.” 

“Intense,” Hux repeats, flatly.

“Are you mocking me?” Ben strides closer, demonstrating that he’s an inch or so taller than Hux. 

“I’ll mock you all I like.” Hux stands his ground and stares up into Ben’s eyes, unblinking. “Wouldn’t you mock someone who showed up out of nowhere at random and made these kinds of claims?”

“No. I respect powerful people who come to me with something to offer.” 

“Ah, I see. That must happen to you all the time, silly me. No one but you has ever walked through a wall and offered to save me, meanwhile.”

Hux flushes when he hears what he’s said. Ben’s eyes are just as he remembered, and he’s always recalled them more vividly than any of the other details of their encounter: dark and piercing but with a startling softness, too, shining now and then with the kind of vulnerability Ben probably would have learned to conceal if he wasn’t powerful enough to leave everything about himself open to challenge.  

“So you acknowledge that I’m powerful,” Ben says, smirking.

“Stay out of my head!”

Hux shoves Ben away with both hands. They both gasp at the resulting feeling: Ben is solid, and so is Hux, but the crackling power that sparked between them when they made contact feels like something far bigger than solidity. Hux can feel it still coursing through him as they stare at each other, motionless-- out of fear of losing this feeling, in Hux’s case. 

“What was that,” Hux asks, trying to sound as irritated as possible, not breathless and wet-mouthed. 

“We can interact physically,” Ben says. His gaze is newly animated, traveling over Hux in a way that makes him feel touched again. 

“Well that makes no sense!” Hux says. He can feel his face heating despite the cool rain that trickles down onto him through the leaves overhead. 

“The ways of the Force can be hard to explain to the unstudied.” 

Hux rolls his eyes and turns away, the spell broken by Ben’s pompous arse-ery. He walks back toward the grimy pond. Ben follows, and Hux has to withhold giddy, disbelieving laughter when he hears Ben’s boots squelch into the mud with each step. He’s really there, somehow. Wherever he came from, he’s touchable.

“So if I stabbed you here, you would die,” Hux postulates. 

“That’s a morbid way to put it. I don’t know that I’d die. Really doubt you could kill me.”

“Ha,” Hux says, though he doubts it, too. 

“I’d bleed, anyway. In theory. But please don’t stab me.” 

“As long as you don’t give me reason to.” Hux pauses on the path and half-turns back toward Ben. They’ve almost reached the clearing ahead where the roofs of the Academy’s tallest buildings are visible in the distance. “If someone else were here, would they see you, too?” Hux asks.

“I’m not sure. I don’t really care to find out.”

“No? You’re the one doing experiments. A student of the Force.” Hux sniffs. 

“Yeah. But this is just for us, I think.”

“For us.” Hux turns toward the pond again. His heart is beating fast, and has been since he felt that electric pushback when he touched Ben. “You don’t even know me.” 

“I’d like to. Tell me about your life. What’s your school like?”

Hux winces. He’s tempted to gush about all of it, which has never happened before. He wants to tell Ben about his doltish roommates and his father’s constant prying that has nothing to do with genuine concern about how Hux’s school career is playing out so much as a need to micromanage his underperforming asset. He even wants to brag about his grades to this strange boy. As if Ben would care. 

“That’s all classified,” Hux says, giving Ben a sideways glance. “Unless you’ve defected from the Republic.” 

“I’ve never cared about the Republic.” 

Admitting this seems to fill Ben with a combination of glee and dread, based on his expression. 

“What do you care about?” Hux asks. 

“My own power. Making the most of it.”

Hux shrugs and nods. He cares about little else himself. Maybe they really are bound together somehow. He’s still not going to offer up any state secrets, though his routines at the Academy probably don’t qualify as such. 

“What’s the future like?” Hux asks. “Is the Republic still controlling all the above-board commerce regulating?” He won’t deign to say they’re in control of much else, though they’d claim to be.

“For now,” Ben says. He smirks at the look Hux gives him. 

“Could we try that again?” Hux asks, hands flexing at his sides. “The-- Physical thing? It was extraordinary, I wonder-- Would it hurt us, do you think, if we tried to maintain contact?”  

Ben’s eyebrows shoot up. Hux wants to punch him. Even Ben’s handsomeness is strange: his ears, nose, overlarge mouth and uneven jaw shouldn’t work together. It’s some form of deep wickedness that they do, especially when Ben looks amused with himself, which is his most irritating attitude. 

“Let’s find out,” Ben says. “C’mere.” 

“You come here.” 

Ben groans. “You’re pointlessly stubborn.” 

“Wrong. Everything I do has a point.”

“That so?” Ben strides closer, and Hux begins to wish he’d been the one to make the first move, thereby having the advantage of not being the person standing still and waiting to be acted upon. “So you’re like a knife,” Ben says, looming over him.

Hux blinks, feeling he’s missed something. “Excuse me?”

“Everything you do has a point?”

Hux recoils, glowering. “That’s the worst attempt at a joke I’ve ever--” 

He gets the words and the breath snatched from him when Ben closes the space between them and takes hold of him by both shoulders. The resulting shockwave of contact seems to roll downward from Ben’s palms, transforming Hux’s body into what feels like a pool of rippling water all the way to his ankles, Ben’s touch like a stone that’s been tossed into the center of him. Hux is so wide-eyed and open-mouthed that he must look like an idiot, but he can’t correct himself. At least Ben looks stunned, too. Hux can hear him breathing heavily, rapidly. 

“I’m touching you from across space and time,” Ben says, spoiling the mood. 

Hux sputters a kind of broken laugh. “If you say so.” 

Ben narrows his eyes and tightens his grip. Hux whimpers. He feels like he’s being held over the edge of a cliff, at the mercy of something much bigger than Ben, and also like he’s glad to be there, dangling. 

“Maybe if we kissed it would kill us both,” Ben says. 

“That’s nonsense.” 

“Then you want to try it?”

“I didn’t say that!” 

Hux swoons anyway, when Ben dips his face in close. He hears Ben laugh at the back of his throat and opens his eyes, glaring and blushing furiously. Before he can tell Ben to fuck off, Ben’s big, clumsy lips are crashing against his own. They don’t die, but Hux feels something that might be the entire galaxy pulsing around them, as if for one moment every bit of wayward energy in existence has refocused onto them with a slap of recognition. This initial jolt fizzles, pleasantly, into clueless soft mouthing at each other that goes on and on as it seems to become increasingly addictive, if continuously inexpert. Hux has never kissed anyone before, and he’s confident from Ben’s lack of technique that this is true of him, too. 

“Oh, shit,” Ben says, yanking back. 

“What’s wrong?” Hux checks over his shoulder, horrified at the thought that some classmate or instructor might have just seen him either kissing a tall boy or mouthing at the air like a lunatic.

“I felt this-- Dammit!” Ben looks down toward their stomachs. “It’s the feeling I got last time, right before I got put back in my own time, in my real body.”

“If this isn’t your real body, what is it?” 

“My spiritual one! My truest self.” 

“Oh,” Hux mutters. He’s holding on hard to Ben’s arms, which still feel solid. “Then you’re leaving?”

“I think I have to. I’m sorry. These visitations are meant to be brief.” 

“Mhm.” Hux stares down at Ben’s chest and doesn’t allow himself to think about how nice it would be to find Ben out here in the woods every time he wanted to be kissed. “Will it be another ten years before I see you again?”

“It was only five years, for me.”

“My question stands!”

Ben kisses Hux on the nose. It feels different, as if some part of Ben has been removed already. His lips are suddenly cooler, not unlike the whisper of the light rain against Hux’s skin. 

“I’ll be back soon,” Ben says. “Things are in motion.” 

“What things?” 

“You’ll see.” 

“Fuck that, tell me!” 

Ben doesn’t, of course. He seems to dissolve into the rain. Hux is left with buzzing lips, a partial erection, and a protest lodged in his throat, some wordless lamentation that no one would hear if he voiced it. He stands with his arms held out toward nothing for some time, waiting for any of what just happened to make sense. By the time he gives up on that, he’s drenched and shaking, soaked through. 

 

**

Ben is so desperate for his third visitation to work that he shows up in Hux’s room screaming with the concentrated rage required to force him through the psychic webbing that held him back. Hux is understandably startled, and the fact that he’s lying in bed and jerking himself off when Ben arrives surely doesn’t ease the shock. 

“Fucking hell!” Hux shouts, dragging the blankets up over his dick. He’s wearing an undershirt and nothing else, face blazing. “Did I just summon you?” he asks when he’s composed himself.

Ben is still breathless and shaking all over. It’s never been this hard before; he was tired of waiting for Snoke’s help. “Are you twenty-three?” he asks when he’s regained his voice. 

Hux frowns. “What? No, I’m nineteen. You look-- Older. Where are you coming from?”

“Fuck!” Ben turns away from Hux, looking for a wall to punch. He manages to restrain himself with a deep breath instead, and turns back to the bed. “Sorry, just. I’m eighteen. I really wanted to get to your current time. But this is still the past.” 

For a long moment neither of them speaks. Hux’s erection is tenting the blankets but wilting steadily. The room they’re in is cozy, with a window overlooking a grassy plain that stretches toward woods that appear to be the same ones where Ben kissed Hux on the mouth three years ago. It’s daytime, sunny outside. There are four single beds in the room, all but Hux’s neatly made. The whole place feels strangely quiet.

“Sorry to interrupt,” Ben says, sincerely.

Hux snorts. “I wondered if I’d brought you here by sheer will,” he says. 

“Why.” Ben shuffles in place. “Were you. Thinking of me?”

“Yes.” Hux seems unembarrassed by this admission, and by the fact that he was pleasuring himself in the middle of the day. “It’s move-out day and I’m the last one here,” he explains. “Graduation was yesterday. I’m Lieutenant Hux now.” 

“Oh. Congratulations.” 

“Thank you. I wanted to have one last wank here. I’ve lived here for five years and this is the first room where I ever did it. I’m not normally just-- Lying around, doing this. This is a special occasion.” 

“You’re weird,” Ben says, grinning to show Hux that he means this in an approving way. 

“That’s rich, coming from you. You say you’re eighteen now?”

“Yeah. First time I’ve been younger than you, at least. Maybe that’s progress.”

“Progress toward what?”

“Me finding you in your current time! That way, uh. You could tell me where you are, in the present. And I could come find you for real.” 

Hux considers this, his legs shifting under the blankets. 

“Find me and do what?” he asks. 

He’s softened his tone: he’s trying to be seductive. Ben has to chew the end of his tongue to keep from laughing with vivid delight that would probably seem mocking. In their time apart, he’s fallen in love with the memory of Hux. It’s breathtaking to be in his presence again, almost for real. He loves this most recent Hux so much already.

“When I find you,” Ben says, approaching the bed. “I’ll have realized my destiny.” 

“Ah, that. Is this what your master tells you?”

Hux says the word ‘master’ like he doesn’t approve of it. 

“I don’t want to talk about him,” Ben says. 

He’s doing this without Snoke’s permission. Snoke has told him to be patient, to wait. That he’ll be reunited with Hux in time. Ben believes him, but Snoke doesn’t understand his urgency. Snoke is thinking only of their shared plan to dominate the galaxy. Ben needs other things from Hux, too. He’s waited long enough, and the memory of kissing Hux in the rain has been worn thin with overuse. He needs more.

“What do you want to talk about?” Hux asks, looking at Ben like he knows. He shifts his hips under the blankets. 

“Tell me what you were thinking,” Ben says. “When I got here. When you had your hand on your cock.”

Saying that word out loud makes Ben feel like his bones will uncouple and send him tumbling into a useless heap of himself. Aside from kissing Hux during their last visitation, and sticking his hand under his own blankets in his own bed, he’s never had anything to do with sex. People still don’t like him, back in the real world. 

“I don’t know if you could handle it,” Hux says. He’s smiling a little, just at the corner of his lips. Ben wants to fall onto him and kiss him madly for hours, or at least until he loses his foothold and gets pitched back into his actual body. He’s afraid to try it, because he’s pretty sure that his uncontainable excitement was what ended the visitation last time. 

“I can handle it,” Ben says. “I’m not a kid anymore.”

“No, you’re certainly not.” Hux’s eyes travel from Ben’s shoulders to his knees and back up again. “All right. Well, I was thinking about a professor of mine.” 

Ben scowls. “I thought you said you were thinking about me.” 

“Yes, I got there eventually. But first I was remembering this professor who put me over his desk and spanked my bare arse before fucking me.” 

Ben feels a new kind of rage rising up within him, snapping all his most delicate bones into splinters. “You let someone else have you.” 

“No, not in the slightest. I let him fuck my arse, as I said. He had and has no part of me, nevertheless.” 

“You liked it.” 

“Yes, I did. I’d been trying to incite him to it for years. He fucked me so hard he made me sore, I couldn’t sit without thinking of it for days--”

“Stop!”

Hux smirks. His hand slips under the blanket and slides down to his tented erection. “Knew you wouldn’t be able to handle it,” he says. 

“Where do I come in?” 

“Well. This professor annoyed me a great deal in the long run, and I may have done some things to stall his career. That’s a longer story. The point is that whenever I remember how good that felt, just the physical sensation of it, I think of you, and how you’d be grown up now, and what it would feel like to have you back there, giving it to me while you seethe into my ear about how we’re destined to rule the galaxy together.” 

Ben exhales. At some point during Hux’s little speech he clenched his fists very tightly at his sides, and now he can’t seem to uncurl his fingers. Hux is stroking himself under the blanket, lazily. It’s like a dare.

“How many professors have you bent over for?” Ben asks. He’s experiencing a near-nauseating combination of arousal and heartache, his cock straining against the front of his pants. 

“Just him,” Hux says. 

“And your classmates?” 

“No, please, don’t insult me. I sucked some dick in the showers like anybody else, but none of them deserved even that much, really.” 

Ben pictures himself in a First Order academy shower, Hux naked and on his knees on the tile before him, Hux’s pink mouth just open against the head of his cock. He has to grind his nails into his palms to keep from turning and putting a fist through the wall. Rage accompanies most of his strong emotions. It’s intoxicating now, like a fuming cloud of heat all around him, making his dick leak as he debates whether to restrain himself further or fall onto Hux immediately. 

“I was always so paranoid about someone finding me like this in here,” Hux says, still stroking himself. “The thought of someone seeing me like this, knowing-- It was my worst fear, sometimes, and now I’m not even sure why. Especially with you standing there watching me. Maybe something in me wanted to be caught.” 

“You like me watching you?”

“Yes.” Hux wets his lips with his tongue. His face is very pink; Ben wants to kiss his hot cheeks so badly that he almost whimpers for the thought of it. “Do you want to take the blanket away?” Hux asks. “You can, if you like.” 

In answer, Ben steps closer. He watches the movement of Hux’s hand under the blanket and wonders if this is how he would be touching himself if he was alone, or if this is just part of a show he’s putting on for Ben. He wishes he could enjoy it for the pure, maddeningly arousing display that it is without the weight of his anticipatory dread. These visitations never last long. He loves Hux so much, it hurts even now. He’s been so alone, and there’s no promise that he won’t be still for many years to come. Snoke offers no timetables. 

“Well, you don’t have to,” Hux says, apparently offended by Ben’s hesitation. 

Ben responds by reaching down and ripping the blanket away. He got a peek at Hux’s cock when he first arrived, before Hux gathered his wits enough to cover it, but he didn’t have enough time then to appreciate the glorious perfection of its modest size and bright flush, not to mention the precisely trimmed bed of soft-looking red hair it protrudes from. Hux is cut in the Imperial fashion, as Ben has come to prefer in holoporn since his research indicated that this is the custom for cocks in Hux’s culture. Hux flattens his shoulders back against his pillow and spreads his legs, letting Ben admire him. His energy feels newly timid, nervous, but there’s a begging pull in it that wants Ben to touch him, kiss him, anything. Ben can’t be sure if Hux is in love with him, too. He wouldn’t know what that felt like, through the Force or otherwise.

“What are you thinking about now?” Ben asks when Hux reaches down to stroke himself again. There’s a little bottle of lubricant on the bed beside him, but it doesn’t look like he’s used any yet.

“I’m wondering why you’ve not put your hands on me yet,” Hux says. His throat bobs when he swallows, the red on his cheeks spreading to his ears. “Or your mouth.” 

“Where would you want me to put my hands. Or my mouth.” 

“Anywhere, take your pick! Isn’t the point of you being here that we can finally, ah. Have each other?”

Everything about Hux’s energy feels like a pleading whine, and Ben loves it almost enough to continue stalling, but he loves Hux more and wants to give him everything he asks for. It’s thrilling to think they don’t even really know each other and yet they do, of course they do: it feels natural and easy to climb into Hux’s bed and slide onto him. They both groan and clasp at each other greedily. Hux wraps his long, bare legs around Ben’s back. 

“I could die like this,” Ben says. The feeling of holding Hux’s trembling, almost naked body against his own cracks through him in waves of energy that make the hair on his arms and across the back of his neck stand up. _Yes_ , the Force tells him, over and over again and without needing actual words. _Yes, this, this is yours, here’s where you belong_.

“Don’t die,” Hux says, softly. He’s humping himself up against Ben a little already, and his hand shakes when he reaches up to tuck Ben’s hair back behind his ear. 

“I just mean I’d be happy to stay right here until I die.”

Hux makes a scolding sound, still stroking Ben’s hair. “You would not,” he says. “You’re no layabout. Look, you’ve got muscles now.” 

“Yeah, I noticed.” Ben presses his face against Hux’s neck and inhales, moaning with regret when he confirms what he’d previously suspected. For whatever reason, his sense of smell can’t travel with the rest of them. He can only imagine what Hux’s warm skin smells like this close. “Can you smell me?” Ben asks, lifting his face.

Hux laughs, then lifts his head from the pillow and holds Ben’s hair against his face, breathing in. The look on his face when he pulls back tells Ben that’s disappointed, too. “Nothing,” Hux says. “Weird. I hadn’t noticed that before.”

“I wasn’t on top of you before.” 

“True.” Hux squirms up against him, grinning. “At least you’re solid.” 

“I think I tasted you, when we kissed.”

“Did you?” Hux licks his lips. “I thought it wasn’t possible to taste things without a sense of smell.”

“Let’s--” 

Hux grabs Ben’s ears and pulls him down to try it before Ben can finish suggesting that they should. There isn’t a taste to it in the way that Ben normally tastes things, but there is something else, something better. It’s as if he’s tasting Hux’s energy rather than his lips or his tongue. Hux tastes like the feeling Ben gets when he powers on his lightsaber, that charge of connection that runs up his arm and burrows into his chest. 

“Would you put your fingers in me?” Hux asks when he pulls back, breathless and unashamed. “I really like doing it myself, but I’ve always thought it must be so much better to have someone else doing it, um. That professor didn’t bother, and. I just want it. From you.” 

“Do you always ask so plainly for what you want?” Ben asks, groping for the bottle of lubricant. Of course he’ll put his fingers inside Hux, though it seems impossible that he’ll survive the act of doing so without exploding, never mind what it would be like to try to fit his cock inside his destined beloved. 

“I’m just afraid we have limited time,” Hux says. His face falls, and Ben’s heart lifts: Hux is heartsick, too, already mourning their separation. This may mean he loves Ben, though it could also mean he just wants to get fingered. “So I thought I’d get right to my number one request.” 

“Where do you think you’ll be in five years?” Ben asks. He’s squirting lube onto his fingers, feeling clueless but driven. 

“I don’t know, serving on a ship someplace.” 

Ben grunts with disapproval at this answer, which he anticipated. “I wish I could find you. Hux.”

“Shh, you have found me. In the most important way, yes? You’re here, oh-- Yes, like, like that, only don’t go so slow--”

Ben thought he was maybe going too fast; he’s got one finger halfway in already. Hux must be practiced in this. The thought makes Ben feel achy and proud and his dick throbs against the front of his pants.

“Fuck,” Ben says, whispering this against Hux’s jaw while he slides his finger in and out, squeezing Hux’s bony right shoulder with his other hand. “You’re so hot. Inside, I mean.” 

“Nnn, another.” 

“Already?”

“Yes, please!” Hux is thrashing around on his pillow, humping himself down against every inward push of Ben’s finger. He shouts when Ben adds a second finger, pinches his eyes shut tight and nods. “Oh,” he says, shuddering. “Yes, ah--”

“That’s good?”

“Yes, there--”

“Like what you wanted? When you thought it would be better?”

Hux whines and nods, hips bucking. Ben kisses him on the mouth and fucks him gently with two fingers, mind whirling and every nerve alight. He’s sure that he’s going to come just from this, and he doesn’t care. 

“What would you do?” Hux asks, panting against Ben’s mouth. He’s close, something at the center of him gathering together. Ben can feel it through the Force, or maybe just because he has two fingers working faster now into Hux’s most secret self. “If, if you found me?”

“You mean when.” Ben grabs Hux’s chin and waits for his eyes to flutter open and lock on his. “When I find you.”

“Ah, yes, oh, _when_ \--”

“‘Cause I’m going to find you, Hux. I’m going to find you and make you my little Imperial whore.” 

Ben isn’t sure where he got that from, but it makes Hux come screaming his name. Maybe he was reading exactly what Hux wanted to hear from his energy. It didn’t feel like that, though. It felt inspired. Ben crashes his mouth against Hux’s while Hux is still gasping and shaking in the aftermath, and it only takes two hard drags of his trapped dick against Hux’s thigh to finish him off. 

For a glorious moment they lie pressed together, chests heaving as their heartbeats begin to calm in what feels like synchronicity, the knife’s edge of pleasure fading to something buttery and sweet like the sunlight through the window. Ben withdraws his fingers carefully, and he licks Hux’s neck when he whimpers as they leave him. The room is blissfully quiet, humming with absence of sound. Hux is so warm under Ben’s hands, against his lips, everywhere. 

“Oh no,” Hux says when he feels it, just like Ben has: the warmth between them cresting and beginning to cool as the visitation nears its end. Hux wraps his legs even tighter around Ben’s back and holds his face with both hands. “Not yet,” he says, shaking his head. “We’ve barely had a chance to talk at all.” 

“I know.” Ben kisses Hux’s face all over, though he can’t feel the heat of it the way he could a moment ago. “I’m sorry, but it’s okay. It’s okay, I’ll find you.” 

“How? You’ve no idea where I’ll be in your time.” 

“I could use the Force, I could meditate on it--”

“And even if you did, how would you get to me?”

“I don’t know, Hux--”

“Don’t be long,” Hux begs. He shuts his eyes and presses his face to Ben’s. “Please, I. I know it’s absurd, that I don’t even know you, not really, but yours is the only company I ever want, I think about our time together to an obsessive degree, and I don’t know how to explain it but whoever, whatever you are-- I’ve only ever cared for you.” 

“Hux--”

Ben is ripped back to reality before he can say _me, too_ , or _thank you_ , or _you understand completely and this is why I belong to you, this is why always have_.

**

Ten years later, the encounter Hux had with Ben in his Academy dorm room feels like it could only ever have been a dream, some kind of mad fantasy that seemed real because he was dozing. His ass ached pleasantly in the aftermath, but he told himself, as he steadily lost hope that Ben was real and coming for him, that he might have just stuck his own fingers up his arse in his sleep, though he never had before and hasn’t since. The kiss in the woods is less easy to discount, but eventually he abandoned even those dearer, more childish hopes that someday the impossible boy who gave him that kiss would appear in reality and swear his fidelity, among other things. He’s not had another dreamy visitation from his supposed destiny, not even while sleeping, and no phantoms have appeared in reality, out of thin air or otherwise.

So he is fully unprepared, up late during his rest cycle and working in the glow of his hovering holo schematics, for Ben to stumble out from the opposite wall with a groan and drop to his knees on the floor, the long robe he’s wearing slick with what looks like blood. 

“You!” Hux shouts, springing up from his seat. Immediately, Ben feels as real as he always did when he appeared in Hux’s life to emotionally torment him and then disappear for five or ten years at a time, and immediately Hux is angrier than he is shocked that Ben is suddenly back and apparently coming from a battle that looks like it nearly killed him. 

When Ben staggers to his feet Hux begins to understand that this is someone else’s blood. It’s on Ben’s face, in his hair, all over his clothing, but he’s got no visible wounds and seems more horror-stunned than near death.

“How,” Ben says, looking down at his gloved, bloody hands. “How did it. Come with me.”

Hux says nothing, delayed shock beginning to make his heart pound. Ben’s face is very white and stricken, his gaze hollow in the way of someone who needs an explanation before he can even try to piece reality back together. It makes Hux feel as if he’s the one who’s stumbled onto this scene without warning.  

“I thought I’d be clean here,” Ben says. 

“I’m dreaming,” Hux says. He backs away until he’s pressed up against the opposite wall. It’s cold and solid and feels very real, like all of this. He pinches his eyes shut and groans. “No, no. We’re not doing this again.” 

“Hux.” 

Ben sounds like he’ll cry. His lip is trembling when Hux opens his eyes. 

“What,” Hux says, tightly. “What do you want now? I’ll tell you what I don’t want,” he says before Ben can answer. “Any more worthless promises from you, or sexual favors for that matter.” 

“I’ve done. I’ve done something.” 

Ben sinks to his knees again after saying so. He’s shaking. He seems so real, even more so than Hux’s desk or chair or the light from the wafting holo docs that comprise his plans. Hux’s eyes dart to the holos: schematics and equations, only the power source for his monster still missing. No one can know what he’s plotting, least of all this mysterious, unreliable ghost who has just intruded. He moves over to the work station and begins closing files, plucking his plans from the air in a way that would make him think of Ben even if Ben wasn’t here, near-sobbing on his office floor. He’s never been able to stop thinking about Ben, even in the absence of any hope that they would ever meet again. 

Hux stands behind his desk when the plans are all put away, only his blank monitor glowing onto him as he stares down at the wrecked heap of this person he’s spent far too much of his life dreaming about. 

“Whose blood is that?” Hux asks.

“Everyone’s,” Ben says. “All of them, my-- The other students. Luke’s students.” 

“Luke?” Hux’s mind goes to Skywalker, the infamous Force user. He’s thought of him before, when considering his memories of Ben and Ben’s talk of a school for Force users, but his research into the location or even existence of such a place came to nothing.

“I’ve made a mess of your room,” Ben says, staring down at the small puddle of blood that’s dripping from the ends of his hair and onto the floor. “It makes no sense, that-- That I brought this with me.” He sniffs and closes his eyes. “Or maybe. Yes, it does. My spiritual self. I’m tainted.” 

“I’m putting it together that you’ve murdered some people,” Hux says. His heart is still racing, and he feels something almost akin to jealousy. He’s never had occasion to kill anyone with his own hands. “I wonder what they did to deserve it.” 

“They got in my way.” 

Ben looks up, his eyes dark and hard in a way that Hux takes as a kind of threat. He presses back against the wall behind him more firmly, though he’s not afraid. He might actually be aroused, and realizing this almost makes him laugh. Nothing has ever gotten him going like his memories of having Ben’s fingers inside him on that last day in his dormitory. Even after resigning himself to believing he’d only imagined it, the thought of it has reliably finished him off in a hurry when he needs to masturbate most efficiently. Sometimes just thinking of the words _my little Imperial whore_ will give him the kind of erection he resents.

“Where’s your physical body?” Hux asks. “Have you been arrested for your crimes?”

“You know I haven’t.” 

Hux huffs, though he does feel like he knew that. “How old are you this time?” he asks. Ben resembles the teenager he was at eighteen, but he’s bigger and stronger and more broken, too. 

Ben rises to his feet and tosses his blood-soaked hair off his face, flinging droplets against the wall behind him. “I’m twenty-four,” he says. “I couldn’t wait any longer.” 

“Any longer for what?” 

“To see you again.” 

“What was keeping you away?”

“My failure to do what was required of me.” 

The arousal coiling in Hux’s belly turns oily and thick, too heavy. Is Ben suggesting that whatever mass murder he’s just committed was some kind of test he had to pass to regain access to his-- To whatever Hux is to him? Hux’s nose twitches at the thought.

“I’m twenty-nine now,” Hux says, feigning composure. He’s undone by this, as ever: it can’t be happening, and yet it is. “So you’ve got me at the right age at last. Five years older than you. We’re in the present, even from your perspective.”

“Where are we?” Ben looks around the room. “This doesn’t feel like a ship.”

“It isn’t one. And you’re presuming I still want to be found by you, ten years later.” 

Hux expects Ben to stalk toward him and challenge that comment. Perhaps he’ll pin Hux to the wall, grab his chin and smear blood there before kissing him. That’s always the way it’s gone in the past: Ben’s confidence sweeps Hux away. 

But Ben only stands there looking chastised. Hux thinks of asking if these were the first murders he’s ever committed, directly or otherwise, but the question is moot, the answer obvious. He sighs and peels away from the wall, clasps his hands behind his back and walks toward Ben. 

“Do you want to clean that off of you?” Hux asks, surprised and annoyed by how gentle this sounds. 

Without looking up, Ben nods. Hux supposes he might actually be asleep at his desk right now. He can’t smell the blood, but he never could smell any part of Ben. It’s an odd feature to note, if these are only dreams. 

“Come with me,” Hux says, after he’s checked to make sure the dimly lit hall outside is empty. 

Ben follows Hux across the hall, into the fresher. They’re in a research facility at a location so secret that, even upon being brought here, Hux wasn’t told the name of this planet. The Order’s code name for it is HB-79. It’s a no-frills operation and his assignment here is temporary, a precursor to what will be a glorious promotion if he can present his designs as functional at the end of this quarter. He wonders if Ben might read all of this from his mind. He might as well, since he’s a figment of Hux’s own imagination. 

“I know you can feel it,” Ben mutters when Hux uses a dampened towel to clean blood from his face, careful not to touch Ben’s skin with his own. 

“Feel what?” Hux asks. 

“That I’m real.”

Hux doesn’t answer, though he can. This feeling has never come to anything in the past, beyond wishful thinking about the ability to keep something he’s never really had. He uses the towel on Ben’s hair once Ben’s face is clean. There is more than one purpose to his cleaning efforts. If this is real, the bloodied towel will still be stained after Ben has gone. He sets it on the sink and removes Ben’s ruined left glove, then his right one. Ben takes them from him and puts them in the pocket of his robe. Hux has to wonder if he’s also thinking of leaving evidence behind, or of being unable to. But why would an apparition care either way?

“There’s nothing left for me in the galaxy but to come to you at last,” Ben says after he’s been quiet a long time. His shoulders are slumped, and he seems to want to drop into Hux’s arms. He’s so big now, he would barely fit there. 

“How can that be true?” Hux asks. “With all your power, there’s plenty for you in the galaxy beyond me, surely.” He’s mocking Ben, though he knows there are people who have powers like the ones he claims sniffing around the Order’s leadership of late, real ones. There are whispers about a very old, very rich man who can split a mountain in two with a flick of his wrist. Hux will believe that when he sees it. In the meantime, he shares his commanding officers’ interest in the prospect of gaining access to that man’s money. The weapon he’s designing will not be inexpensive.

“You don’t comprehend,” Ben says, meeting Hux’s eyes at last, “What I’ve done for you.”

“You sound like my father.” 

Ben rises to his full height, rage sharpening in his eyes: as if he knows Brendol, and Hux supposes he knows enough. He was there, if he’s ever really been anywhere, that day when Hux had the rising mark of Brendol’s latest attack on his face. It was the last time Brendol ever hit him, just before his fortune changed. It’s impossible to think Ben and his _master_ had anything to do with that, but Hux has never been able to uncover any other reason a grown man suddenly wanted to turn an army of deadly children over to a five-year-old boy who’d never been anything but laughed at and pushed around before that. 

“Come on,” Hux says. He’s still uncomfortable with the memory: of Brendol hitting him in front of those other men, and of what fell inexplicably into his hands after Ben disappeared, how it changed everything so suddenly. “Back to my office, before someone walks in here and sees me wiping blood off you.” As if anyone else in the research wing is working during this stage of the rest cycle. In two hours Hux will have to report for trooper inspection duty. 

Back in Hux’s office, Ben takes off his heavy robe, where his victims’ blood is drying now. Hux wonders what their ages were; Ben was only ten years old when he came to Hux and said he’d been sent to that school. 

Hux leans against the front of his desk and folds his arms over his chest, guarded and disturbed but curious, too. He doesn’t want this to end yet, whatever it is. Ben seems so tired, and Hux wonders what would happen if he took Ben back to his small room, into his bed. 

“What will you do now?” Hux asks.

“I told you. I’ll be coming for you.” 

Hux snorts. “And what would you do if you managed to find this place, in reality? Put me over your shoulder and carry me back to your lair? Or would you make a camp out in the mountains and lurk about the edges of my life? Would I be expected to go out and visit you, to sleep on the ground by your cook fire after you’d had me?”

Hux has maybe thought about this before.

Ben shakes his head. “You still don’t understand what you are,” he says.

“And what’s that? You’re going to tell me?”

“I’ve told you, all this time. You are the destiny of the most powerful Force user in the galaxy, the sole descendant of the Chosen One. You are special, you are _worthy_. I’ve done things to earn the right to come to you, and now my master will allow it. Not only that-- He’ll bring us together.” 

So Ben has gone mad, Hux thinks. That makes them a matched set indeed. Hux walks forward, still afraid to touch Ben with his bare hands. Doing so would make all this real in an inescapable way, he fears. Funny, because wanting it to be real was his dearest wish for so long, before he learned how to close that part of himself away. 

“What do you know of me that makes you believe this?” Hux asks. He’s close enough to touch Ben but doesn’t dare it. “Is it just that you’ve been told it’s true? By the Force? By your master?” 

“Don’t be stupid.” 

“I’m not trying to be. Is it just that you liked kissing me? Or that I was a crying boy when you found me?” He doesn’t say: or that I will be Emperor not long after I make this weapon work.

“You’re either lying or it’s all gone wrong,” Ben says. 

“Lying about what?” 

“That you didn’t feel it, whenever we were together. That you don’t understand.” 

“I hardly remember the feeling, as I’ve been without it for ten years.” 

Now that is a lie, and now Hux understands what Ben is accusing him of denying. 

“Then let me remind you,” Ben says.  

“Yes, please. Do try.”

Ben grabs Hux by the shoulders but doesn’t kiss him. Instead he spins Hux around, walks him to the desk and puts him over it, leaning down onto him and nosing at the back of his neck. 

“Comfortable?” Ben asks, murmuring this against Hux’s ear.

Hux breathes against his desktop, heat starting in his face and moving downward to his cock, which is already getting hard against the side of the desk. He can feel the press of Ben’s twitching toward hardness against the seat of his pants. For a moment Hux is confused, and he grins when he remembers the story he made up when Ben asked him what he was fantasizing about while he wanked himself off. It was a legitimate and well-worn fantasy he had as a cadet, an elaborate scenario about being spanked and fucked by a certain professor, but it never actually happened. All the sex Hux has ever had has involved his dick in someone else’s arse, as he’s never come anywhere near trusting someone to do the same to him. For the most part it bores him and he usually returns to his fantasies rather than dealing with the questionable hygiene of whatever arse is on offer to him.

“I’ve thought about this,” Ben says, fumbling at the front of his pants. “So much, ever since--” He’s shaky and seems close to a breakdown, likely still trying to process what he’s done and making a seeming attempt to put all that uncertain energy into fucking. “Tell me you want it, too.” 

“Of course I do.” 

Hux presses back against Ben and gropes for the top drawer on his desk, seeking the thin container of lubricant he keeps there. It’s discreet, resembling a stylus. There’s no monitor for watching holoporn in his personal quarters, so he does most of his wanking in his office. His heart is slamming when he slips the lube into Ben’s hand. The first brush of his skin against Ben’s holds a charge, but it’s mellower than he remembers it. Perhaps it’s the lack of time travel. Hux laughs against the desk when he thinks of this, realizing how tired he is only when he rests forehead down. 

“What’s so funny,” Ben says. He’s got the lube open and Hux can hear that he’s using too much of it. 

“If I tell you, it’ll ruin the surprise.” 

Hux is referring to his actual inexperience. The surprise in this case is the presumed tightness of his arse, though he is not unaccustomed to putting inanimate helpmates up there. He undoes his belt and slides his pants and briefs down just enough to expose his vulnerable backside. Of all the characters he might have trusted with this particular milestone, he can’t fathom letting anyone but his imaginary friend Ben do this to him. Perhaps it’s Ben’s imaginariness itself that makes Hux feel safe, but Ben feels very real as he parts Hux’s arse cheeks and takes a long look at his exposed hole. 

Ben stuffs one slick finger into Hux, drawing an appreciative moan from him. Hux had hoped, back when he hoped this would happen again someday, that Ben would remember his request to act quickly, with no hesitation. 

“It’s funny we’re doing this, of all things,” Hux says, huffing and pressing his hips back, “Don’t you think? Here we are, ah. Discussing our destiny, cleaning blood from one another’s person, you’re walking through walls and sometimes through time itself to visit me. And all for the noble, nhh-- _yes_. All so you can get at my arsehole.” 

“That’s not all I’m doing.” Ben crooks his finger: has he been practicing on someone? Hux shouts and bucks into the feeling. It’s still so, so much better having Ben do it, damnably. “This is a physical manifestation of our connection,” Ben says, still rubbing at Hux’s prostate with a persistent tenderness that feels perfect. It’s too good to be true, like all of Ben. “Unless it’s beneath you,” Ben says. “In which case I’ll stop.” 

“Don’t stop,” Hux says, shifting his legs apart. “I want it, all of it. Leave something in me this time. Your evidence.” 

He almost laughs again at hearing himself call Ben’s come his _evidence_ , but he manages to hold it in. Part of what he’s always liked about Ben is his ridiculousness, and that he offers Hux an opportunity to be ridiculous in response. No one else in Hux’s life has ever been able to entertain him. No one else is any fun at all, and he tells himself that’s for the best but knows it really isn’t, or at least that the lack of it leaves him wanting. He moans against his desk and nods, eyes closed, when Ben slides another finger in. Hux doesn’t really require this much preparation; he was at himself less than a cycle ago with a sizable synthetic. But he’s been wanting this feeling back for ten years, this sensation of not being just filled but opened, methodically, by someone who wants in. 

“Keeping this so close at hand,” Ben says. He throws the lube onto the desk, and Hux understands that Ben has slicked up his cock, that he doesn’t want to wait any longer. “So many people must have had you like this, over your little desk. You’re prepared.” 

“Do you really believe that?” Hux props himself up on his elbows, turns to look at Ben and shrugs one shoulder. “If you do, I suppose you don’t really know me at all. We might as well be strangers.” 

“I’ve thought about it,” Ben says. He’s stroking himself, trying to look menacing. “Worried about it, I mean.” 

“That your destined property would be damaged?”

“No. That you. That by the time I-- Did it. What he’d asked. That you’d have taken up with someone else.” 

“Hmph, well, again. Shows how much you know about me.” 

“I will show you.” Ben says, leaning down over Hux. Just the touch of his cockhead against Hux’s arse cheek makes them both shiver. 

“With your dick?” Hux says. “Oh, good, then-- Yes. Please, do.”

Hux’s mouth remains open as Ren breaches him. He’s big; Hux noticed this when Ben humped against his thigh ten years ago and he seems even bigger now; is that possible? He hears himself beginning to whine in a pinched, dry sort of way as more and more of Ben sinks into him, but he doesn’t care. The odd thing is that this does make him feel sort of known, or understood. It shouldn’t, and the feeling will certainly fade as soon as the burn in his arse has, but for the moment he’s content, or actually more like ecstatic, to cling to the sides of his desk with both hands and huff his breath against the desk as his feet inch apart and his back arches. More, more, there’s so much of Ben. That’s always been true, despite his scarce appearances in Hux’s life. He takes up so much space in Hux’s mind regardless, and in other, more secret places within him as well.

For a while they’re just locked together with Ben all in, both of them breathing hard and twitching cautiously into this feeling. Ben has settled heavily over Hux’s back, and Hux lies boneless beneath him, against the desk. He’s surprised how good it feels, and wonders if Ben is reluctant to move because he fears that his climax will end the visit as before. Hux waits it out without inquiring. He reaches back and palms Ben’s naked arse, wishing he had hours to lay Ben out and touch all of him, see everything. 

“You are the most massive man I’ve ever known,” Hux says, hoping that Ben will understand he doesn’t only mean this literally. He twitches his hips back, briefly concerned that Ben is falling asleep back there. 

“You feel so good,” Ben says after seeming to consider how to respond to this for some time. He sounds sad, like maybe he’s thinking about what he’s sacrificed for this good feeling. His lips are pressed to Hux’s cheek, and he’s spread his hands overtop of Hux’s on the desk. “All my life I’ve wanted to, just. Have you under my arm.” 

“I’m not in the habit of being under anyone’s arm, and anyway now you’ve got me around your dick, isn’t that better?”

“Shut up,” Ben mutters, fondly. He gives Hux a wet, lingering kiss on the cheek and hugs himself around Hux more snugly, thighs and all. “I think, in real life. You’ll piss me off at least once a day.” 

“I’m confident you’ll do the same.”

It feels good to pretend that he doesn’t think it will be at least another ten years until their next meeting. Or, almost good. Hux presses his arse back insistently, not wanting to think about much of anything just yet. He gasps when Ben gives him a first thrust, too fast.

“Careful,” Hux says, clenching up all over. “I-- I’ve done this, but. Not ever with a real cock, so.”

“But.” Ben has frozen, his fingers clawed around Hux’s on the desk. “You said--”

“I know what I said! I was a teenager, trying to impress you. I had to do something, you were a magic person who walked through walls and traveled through time. I wanted to at least not be a lonely virgin, in comparison.” 

“Hux.” Ben’s voice breaks around his name; it’s embarrassing. But Hux also loves it and turns desperately into the kisses Ben gives him, their tongues slipping together clumsily at this angle. Hux’s neck will be sore in the morning, among other things.

Eventually neither of them is careful, because when have they ever been. Hux grinds himself back onto Ben’s cock and asks for more, not even knowing if he means harder or faster until Ben gives him both, nor considering how loudly he’s shouting Ben’s name. He can’t make himself care even after he has realized it, after he’s sprayed come all over the side of his desk: they’re in another world, they’re outside of time. Or maybe they’re not, because when Ben comes in Hux’s arse he can feel the lukewarm reality of it leaking from him even before Ben pulls free, dribbling down between his thighs while Ben is still moaning and petting him, asking if he’s okay.

“You came here covered in blood to claim your destiny with your dick,” Hux says, half-laughing, still breathless. “And you ask me, ah. If I’m _okay_.”

“Are you?” 

Ben sounds serious. Hux laughs again, but it turns into a kind of whimper. He can feel the heat against his back beginning to dissipate. He hopes it’s just the sweat cooling under his uniform shirt. He knows that it’s not, that Ben will be gone soon. 

“It doesn’t matter,” Ben says. He slides from Hux slowly: careful, now. “It’s all coming true,” he says when he turns Hux over to face him. “Our waiting was only a test.”

But he looks terrified, too. Like he’s thinking, as Hux is: I will never have a good thing. Like he knows that what he’s done today confirmed rather than destroyed this truth.

“I’m here,” Hux says. He touches Ben’s face and swallows down a complaint when Ben doesn’t feel as real as he should. “I’ll hate you, though, if you leave me alone for another ten years. I really will this time. I’m very vindictive, don’t test me.”

Ben kisses him on the lips, nodding. When he disappears, he still hasn’t pulled up his pants. Hux wonders what this will mean in the place where he returns to. 

He allows himself a moment of stunned silence, listening to the buzz from the monitor behind him and the otherwise untouchable silence of this facility. Of course no one heard him screaming Ben’s name; not even a janitorial droid is working at this hour. He pulls his pants up, comforted that he can feel Ben’s come pooling in his briefs. But there is no blood pooled on the floor nor splattered on the wall. 

In a stupor he runs toward the fresher across the hall. Might he still be asleep? The towel he used to clean Ben’s face and hair is just where he left it on the edge of the sink, but it’s not pinked with blood. There are no diluted drips in the sink. There’s nothing, anywhere, aside from the wet heat between Hux’s legs, which might only be the lubricant. 

It’s not until he returns to his room and undresses that he notices the faint smear of blood on his neck. It’s not his; there is no cut. It’s the kind of residue a stray piece of Ben’s sweat-damp hair would have brushed onto his skin while they fucked. Hux examines his clothing closely, looking for any trace of the blood his phantom spilled elsewhere, but there’s nothing. Sitting in bed, unwilling to even attempt sleep, he tries to take comfort in the fact that only the parts of Ben that touched his skin left behind a trace. We are connected, he thinks, his eyes blurring over. Whatever he has done-- if it is real, if he is real --I have done it, too.

**

In the morning it’s all back to feeling like a dream. Even a hangnail he chewed on in his sleep might be responsible for the faint smear of pinkish blood on his neck. 

A year later, with no word from Ben in reality or otherwise, it’s the last nail in the coldest and most deeply buried coffin his heart has known. He will not entertain so much as another dream. 

**

When Kylo Ren comes aboard _Finalizer_ shortly after Hux’s thirtieth birthday, no one says the words _Force user_. Not even in a whisper. It’s only Kylo’s attire that makes Hux think of Ben. He is Snoke’s enforcer, they say. Snoke’s eyes and ears on the ground while Snoke lurks elsewhere, financing all of this and issuing orders from afar. Hux is unimpressed with Kylo Ren, who seems to be a glorified bodyguard, but his heart is pounding when Ren asks, through his vocoder, to speak to him in private.

As soon as the mask comes off, Hux feels like he knew. But that’s always been the way with Ben. Hux dies alone and untouched a thousand times until he’s plucked out of the garbage chute at the last moment, alive after all, angry about his relief but unable to deny it. 

“What kept you,” Hux says, as coolly as he can. He’d be far worse than a fool to fall for this again, but as soon as the helmet came off he could smell Ben’s sweat, his hair, the heat of his skin. He can hear it when Ben swallows. 

“Duty,” Ben says. He’s determined not to apologize and scared that he will: Hux can see it wavering in Ben’s eyes, the need to beg for forgiveness battling his pride and the commands he’s determined to follow, everything that doesn’t belong to Hux yet. “I had training to complete.” 

“Might have mentioned that--”

“He didn’t tell me.” Ben looks down at Hux’s chest. “I’m. I--” 

“Ben--”

“No. He’s dead.”

Hux rolls his eyes. “He’s standing right here, however.” He can’t believe it, but that’s never stopped Ben being in his life before now.

Ben shakes his head. “I’ve always been Kylo Ren. I just didn’t know my real name yet. You’ll have to relearn it. Please.” 

Hux wants to protest. Who the hell is Kylo Ren? Not the boy he knew. But he can relate to a certain intense horror at being called by his boyhood name. 

“Fine,” he says. “You’re really-- He’s stationed you here?”

“Yes.”

“He’s terrifying, you know? Snoke? That’s been your master all along? Since you were a little boy with that braid thing on your shoulder?”

Ben-- _Kylo_ , Hux supposes --looks down at Hux’s chest again. “Yes,” he says, muttering. Hux isn’t sure which question he’s answering. All of them, maybe. 

“He really asked you to do-- What you did. For me?”

“It’s complicated.” Kylo lifts his eyes to Hux’s, narrows them. “Comfort must be strictly sanctioned, in my discipline. I had to earn you.”

Hux feels his eyebrows shoot up. Only his phantom lover from the future has ever provoked such an unguarded reaction. 

“Then come with me,” Hux says, taking Kylo’s arm. “I have some comfort I think I’ve earned from you, too.” 

He expects Kylo to disappear all the way back to his quarters. He expects it even after they’ve fucked three times, even after he’s fought to stay awake just so he can watch Kylo sleep, afraid to close his eyes and lose him again. Even when he half-wakes and feels Kylo stroking his hair, still warm and close and smelling of sex, and in all their long years of partnership that follow, he’s always afraid that Kylo cannot be kept. 

Snoke uses this against them, too.

**

Kylo wakes from a dream many years later and gathers Hux close in the dark, heart pounding. Hux took a stim before bed to help him sleep and doesn’t stir, except to sigh in his sleep when Kylo kisses his cheek. 

Kylo wishes he could wake Hux up, because by the start of their work cycle this dream won’t feel so horrifying. He’ll forget it, he’s sure. Or maybe he only wishes that he could, because he won’t be able to tell Hux about it. Because how could he ever tell it to anyone?

He dreamed of a world without Snoke. Not briefly, but vividly. As if it was a full life he lived before waking. He’s no longer grateful to Snoke for anything except his introduction to Hux. He’s always imagined that he never would have found Hux without Snoke’s monstrous interference. It’s been a comfort in his darkest moments. He has Hux, they fought their way back to each other through all the wreckage, and without Snoke they never would have--

But the dream. In it, Snoke did not exist. Without his distant influence, Brendol Hux and many others who would have come to comprise the First Order were captured by Republic forces after the war, including the man’s young son. 

Armitage was taken in by a family in the New Republic, not unlike Ben Solo’s mother had been once. He was unhappy, disoriented and lonely, and when he was fifteen, working part-time at a bakery to earn some credits of his own, he was not eager to be smiled at by a ten-year-old boy who was red-eyed because he’d just run away from home, because he refused to go away from his family and train to be a Jedi.

Ben went back to that bakery, in the dream, for years and years, feeling like he had waited an eternity, every time, for one precious glance from Armitage, desperate for the skinny, red-haired waiter to so much as hold his hopeful gaze while he placed his order. As if this single, small person’s interest somehow meant everything.

“What’s the matter?” Hux mutters, startling Kylo.

“Nothing.” 

“You’re-- Are you shaking?”

“No, nothing. Go back to sleep.” 

Kylo hugs Hux closer. It doesn’t matter. No, it does: because this reality is better. Now they will rule the galaxy together. For all the pain he caused before they destroyed him, Snoke still helped them. Anyway, it was just a dream.

Never mind that in that dream, Ben Solo came home from flight school to find Armitage Hux managing the bakery. Never mind that there was a smear of flour on Armitage’s neck and Ben pointed to it, and when Armitage flushed and finally smiled at him Ben knew, untouched by any master who had told him so: he is my destiny. 

**


End file.
